A woman in Texas, United States has been formally indicted by a grand jury in the attempted drowning of a three-year-old Palestinian American girl earlier this year that police said was motivated by racial hatred.
The suspect, identified as Elizabeth Wolf, aged 42, was charged by a grand jury in Tarrant County in an indictment filed last month that included a hate crime enhancement, according to court records that came to light on Tuesday.
Wolf, whose representative could not immediately be reached for comment, was charged with attempted capital murder of a person under 10 years of age and intentionally causing bodily injury to a child. The hate crime element of the indictment may raise the severity of Wolf’s sentence if she is found guilty.
According to a police report, the attack in May occurred at an apartment complex swimming pool in the Dallas-Fort Worth suburb of Euless.
At the time, the suspect approached the mother of the three-year-old girl, who was also at the pool with her six-year-old son, and asked where they were from. The suspect then tried to drown the three-year-old and also attempted to grab the six-year-old boy, the police report said.
The mother was able to pull her daughter from the water, police said, and local medics responded to the scene and the children were medically cleared.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-Texas) said earlier this year that the accused approached the mother of the children “with racist interrogations” and then grabbed the children – who were in the shallow end of the pool – and pulled them into the deep end in the alleged drowning attempt.
Human rights advocates have warned about rising threats against Palestinian Americans, Muslims, Arabs and Jews since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza.
In late November, three Palestinian men in their early 20s were shot near a university campus in Vermont in the US, injuring all three of them.
A month earlier, a six-year-old Palestinian American boy was stabbed to death in Illinois. Police charged a 71-year-old man with murder and a hate crime for stabbing the child to death and seriously injuring his mother.
According to the police, the elderly attacker targeted the victims as a response to the war in Gaza and their religion.
